Duplicity
by InkBlotAndCoffeeCups
Summary: Harry Potter has played the part of the Golden Boy since the day he came to Hogwarts; constrained by compulsions and obliviates, he has been forced to do Dumbledore's bidding for years. Unbeknownst to all, Harry is perfectly aware of what Dumbledore is doing, has been neutral for most of his life, and has been playing everyone. Twisted!Dumbledore, Possible Time Travel
1. Revelation

'_Perhaps_' Harry pondered, dimly aware that his limbs were beginning to spasm and his fingers were tingling in the precursor for shock, '_there was some truth to what the Dursleys said, after all. Maybe I am a freak_.' Then, '_My head hurts_,' because that was as deep as he was capable of thinking at the moment. He watched, transfixed, as the mutilated, gelatinous mass of brain matter slid agonizingly slowly down the side of the Dursleys' new television set before landing with a muted thunk on the floor. He shuddered, teeth beginning to chatter, and tried to goad his limbs into movement. Skinny biceps strained uselessly.

God, it was cold. He could've sworn it was summer earlier that same morning. Then again, a sizeable chunk of his brain was now mingling with the leftover antibacterial wash in the carpet; honestly, it was a miracle he was even capable of thinking at all.

'_Oh…oh no…the carpet…_' Aunt Petunia was going to kill him. Why wasn't he dead yet? His brain was there, and he was here, and why wasn't he dead? His brain…was….

Harry retched violently, tremors sending him shuddering back to the floor. The carpet (white; Aunt Petunia would kill him, bring him back, and then lock him in the cupboard for YEARS) had a faintly chemical odor. No doubt it was because of his Aunt's constant, borderline-obsessive scrubbing. It itched against the skin of his cheek.

His cheek…his cheek felt weird. Really weird. He should do something about that. About his cheek feeling weird.

Once Dudley, incensed that Harry had received the last piece of bacon, had smacked him, hard and in the mouth, with a metal serving fork. (Never mind that it was his ONLY piece of bacon. While Dudley had wolfed down four pancakes, three pieces of bacon, and a sausage, Harry had been up to his elbows in dishwater in accordance with his Aunt's shrill insistence that he "Finish the dishes, boy, or you'll get no breakfast. I won't have you skirting your duties in any home of mine!") Due to an unfortunate blend of chance and uncoordination, Harry had received the fork in such a way that the tines dug straight through his cheek and pierced his upper right gum. Four hours and a brief debate later (Vernon had insisted he was faking it, whereas Petunia had been busy comforting a hysterically sobbing Dudley; his cousin had always been comfortable in the knowledge that a couple of tears could absolve him of any guilt in his parents' eyes, up to and including manslaughter.) Harry had emerged, blinking, into the bright sunlight of the county hospital's parking lot, his cheek shot full of lidocaine. The experience was rather singular in that during the short time before the drug wore off, he could've been absolutely sure that he was taking a drink from the nearby drinking fountain, while in actuality he was letting water drip off his face and soak his shirt. He'd pinched his lip and been completely unaware of any sort of discomfort; when he'd ran a curious tongue over his stitches the pain that he'd known was there had lain dormant and unresponsive.

The feeling was remarkably similar to what he was feeling now, save for the fact that his head felt a bit like it had imploded. The rest of his body-toes, arms, torso, cheek-felt unattached, as if they were no longer under his jurisdiction. That would certainly explain why he was having so much trouble moving.

Harry tried to clench the fingers of his left hand and was dismayed to see that they didn't so much as twitch. He felt slightly less hopeless when the fingers on his right hand did; being confined to one side was slightly better than being unable to move at all. After all, it wasn't like anyone was going to come to his rescue; the Dursley's had left town for a car show earlier that morning, and the list of chores they had graced him with probably wouldn't be very useful in this situation. He felt slightly vindicated in that they couldn't possibly expect him to paint the walls, mow the lawn, and do the vacuuming when his brain was in two different places. Probably.

They would be furious about the television, though. He hadn't intended to drop it, but somehow he doubted that they would be feeling particularly sympathetic in light of the rather…broken…state of their newest electronic. He'd been moving it out of Dudley's second bedroom; the punishment for getting PAINT on his cousin's most recent plaything wasn't very fun to dwell on, and he'd only just got his glasses to bend back into a vague semblance of what they used to be before Dudley had punched him in the nose the other day. He'd known it was heavy (it was kind of hard not to notice, to be honest), but he'd figured he'd only have to lift it into the hallway. Halfway there he'd realized, in a rare moment of forethought, that he was going to have to paint the hall as well. Why not carry it downstairs now, while it was already situated as comfortably as possible-which is to say, not comfortably at all, but he wasn't picky. He'd staggered down the hall, the vein at his temple throbbing as his face steadily took on a reddish hue, and trundled down to the first step. The second. The third. The fou-

He had slipped sideways and forward, the height of the staircase suddenly sprawling out before him, and made a desperate, foolish grab for the television. '_Should've grabbed the railing_,' he thought numbly, recalling the blinding pain as he'd landed, heavily, at the bottom of the stairs. That had been nothing, however, to the millisecond of absolute horror he'd experienced when he caught a glimpse of the enormous, weighty television right before it had smacked into his skull and rolled, corner over corner, across the room. There was a spray of blood on the carpet for every time the bloodied edge had come into contact with the floor. "My edge," Harry said aloud, and his voice was swallowed by the silence.

God, his head hurt. And it was so cold….

He shakily dragged himself forward-everything was blurry, he must've lost his glasses in the fall-until he was even with the television. He stared at it. Vaguely he wondered who was sobbing, then realized in a moment of clarity that it was himself. For some reason that was immensely funny. He laughed uncontrollably, then suddenly screamed. His high, unearthly shrieks rent the silence; he continued until his voice was hoarse before abruptly going silent and clutching up the brain matter gathered on the floor in desperation. It was rubbery and slimy between his fingers- like the raw chicken he'd tenderized for dinner the night before, just the same- and blood immediately soaked his palm.

There was an awful lot of blood, too-it saturated his hair and slid down his face in thin, erratic trails of crimson that ended at his chin-and he couldn't quite conceive of how it could possibly all be his. Perhaps the television had landed on someone else as well? Harry squinted around at the room; nothing looked out of the ordinary, save for the irregular red patches dotting the carpet and the craggy black shards of broken plastic and glass. Huh. So it was all his. How odd.

Harry laughed, screamed, and shoved the handful of brain matter into his open skull. The world exploded in unbearable, all-encompassing agony, and he fainted dead away.

Harry awoke with a vague sense of unease and a headache. He lay there, quietly contemplating the new development and lethargically attempting to remember why, exactly, he was lying on what was undeniably not his cot in the cupboard, for close to three minutes. He let out a quiet huff of breath, then lay there for three more. Though eluded him. At around the ten-minute mark, he hesitantly cracked open one eye-a blur of white and brown and the weak light of midmorning-before he let it droop back into place.

He was tired with a bone-deep weariness; it brought to mind, vaguely, the memory of the time when Vernon, furious over some sort of perceived slight, had forced him to run up and down the stairs as punishment. By the time his uncle had remembered him it had been well over five hours, and Harry had ached to the point where each step felt like a mile. The next day he'd been unable to walk, and had spent several long hours trying in vain to massage out the knots in his calves and thighs. At the moment he felt remarkably similar, except his legs weren't nearly as sore and he had a killer of a headache.

Harry summoned his energy and managed to open both eyes and blink owlishly for a bit. He indulged in a moment of pride at the marked improvement before concentrating on his surroundings instead. The entrance hall ceiling spun wildly for several moments before coming into focus; Harry swallowed painfully, feeling suddenly parched. Why was he in the entrance hall? Had he been sleepwalking?

An attempt to sit up resulted in his vomiting violently onto the rug. God bloody damn. He was going to have to clean that up. Speaking of bloody, it would be hell to get out all those stains-

Harry froze. Somewhere in the background, the clock chimed two.

"SHIT." His hand flew instinctively to his forehead and he cringed, expecting to be sent back to the floor in a wave of agony, but was shocked into silence by the presence of a slight, barely-there throb. His fingers tangled in crusty strands of curly black hair, and when he pulled his hand back it was coated in a rusty spray of reddish flakes. The room spun. He ignored it.

Harry slowly, shakily, pressed his palm against the hallway wall, using it to drag himself to his feet. His legs nearly bucked and he locked his knees, sucking in deep, steadying breaths. His arms quivered. He felt brittle, as if he was an autumn leaf that had been trampled straight to dust; his heart was pounding frenetically beneath his ribs. He spared a moment to lean against the wall before making his faltering, agonizingly slow way to the downstairs bathroom. The small boy paused in the doorway, briefly contemplating letting himself sink to the floor, and then continued on until he could face the gilded mirror. Haunted green eyes stared back.

Well. That was it then. He was dead. There was absolutely no way someone who looked like that-cracked blood dried across his face and hair plastered to his head in a stiff, matted glob-could be alive.

Harry stood expectantly, waiting to see what horrors his revelation would bring, for several more minutes. When nothing happened, he tenderly parted the hair on his skull in an attempt to see the ghastly, broken mess of his head. It wasn't there. What WAS there was the pale, unbroken skin of his forehead, soft and pliant beneath his fingertips as it had always been, and a thin, jagged scar. He scratched at the dried blood surrounding it idly, watching, transfixed, as it fell to the floor in powdery clumps.

'_Ok. Not dead, then_.'

Harry nodded, straightening. He could deal with this. He had dealt with the Dursleys for years now. He had drank from the toilet, once, on Dudley's rather forceful command, and had staunchly fended off Petunia Dursley's attempts to fit him into a rather hideous orange sweater until it mysteriously shrunk to a quarter of its size. Once he had turned his teacher's wig blue, and consequently stuck out his resultant punishment in the cupboard afterwards. He had put up with Aunt Marge, who insulted his too-dead-to-defend-themselves-parents, and spent several hours of his childhood waiting out her cantankerous bulldog, Ripper, while in the branches of the feeble-looking tree in the backyard. Once, Dudley had even sat on his face. Harry Potter was, without a doubt, incapable of being fazed by anything the world had to throw at him.

Four minutes later he clambered back to his feet from where he had been previously sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth and muttering panicked entreaties to "help, oh help oh God oh help oh shit oh shit shit shit shit SHIT-". He stepped into the shower, clothes and all, and turned on the water full blast. Then he stripped himself of his too-baggy clothes and scrubbed every trace of blood from his body.

Forty minutes later a thin, rather bedraggled looking boy stepped out of the shower, leaving his clothes to drip rose-pink water trails, and changed into a baggier, albeit cleaner, set. Then he spent two hours painstakingly scrubbing the carpets with enough bleach to turn a black lab white and an entire bottle of dish detergent. When there were only faint, for the most part unnoticeable patches left, Harry checked the kitchen clock-it said it was two in the afternoon, but without an automatic calendar his calculations could've been off by an entire day-went back to the bathroom, and washed out his clothes. He steadfastedly ignored the way tiny specks of blood swirled down the drain when he picked them up and concentrated on wringing them out instead.

There was nothing to be done about the television. No doubt he would be in quite a bit of trouble, but with the TV looking as it did-like a giant, black pile of scrap-there was really no helping it. The Dursleys would be upset with him either way, seeing as how he wouldn't be able to finish all his chores before they returned. Harry carefully swiped the blood off the cracked screen, then stooped down to pick up his glasses, which had been laying, discarded, beside it. He placed them on his nose, gingerly holding the bent frame in place, but frowned when his vision instantly blurred. '_What_-'

He yanked them off and the room jolted back into clarity. '_How_…'

…he put them on. The room went fuzzy. He took them off. It snapped back into focus. He put them on again, just for the hell of it, and almost tripped over his own feet. Harry giggled, his eyes widening as he realized, with an elated rush of disbelief, that he could SEE. He crammed his glasses back onto his nose, then laughed out loud with his discovery.

"Blurry! Brilliant!" He tore them off.

"Brilliant! Just, just absolutely-can see everything, and I'm not even wearing them-" He took in the sharp corners and defined angles of the room, then repeated ecstatically, "Brilliant!"

No more too-thick lenses! No more whispers at school about "tape-face Potter" and his four-eyed face! Harry read the title off a book half-way across the room-"Grunnings", no doubt it was Vernon's-and whooped for joy. Just yesterday he had been part blind, and now, as if by magic-!

Harry slowed, thinking hard. '_As if by magic_'. His Aunt and Uncle had always been violently opposed to even the mention of anything out of the ordinary; they were the epitome of normal, and that was how they liked it. Harry had always felt rather smothered by such a concept, seeing as how science had never really given him much of an explanation for some of the…things…that he did. Was it wind that had carried him up onto the school roof during his desperate attempt to get away from Dudley and his entourage of schoolyard bullies? Was it a spontaneous chemical reaction, as Aunt Petunia had explained acerbically, that had turned his teacher's wig blue? There were no scientific theories that could explain away the ability of a human boy to stare at a bit of his brain, pick it up, stuff it back into his head, and then wake up with nothing more than a mere headache. Harry was fairly sure there wasn't, at least. And what about that time when Dudley had pushed him into oncoming traffic and the car, instead of breaking his ribs, had simply gone through him as if it was nothing more than a midsummer breeze? Or the time when he had apologized for stepping on the tail of a garden snake and it had excused him in a sibilant, whispery voice? At the time he'd thought he had imagined it, but in lieu of all that had occurred….

Harry glanced nervously around the room, feeling suddenly paranoid that the Dursleys would pop out at any moment screaming in fury, then turned back to his thoughts. If, just for a moment, he entertained the thought that maybe it wasn't just a string of coincidence that had brought about the unexplainable events scattered throughout his life… if magic was REAL….

It was at that moment that Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived and unwitting savior of the wizarding world, tentatively began to believe in magic. He was seven years old.


	2. The Arrival of The Giant

1. Harry liked Spanish. He liked the way the words flowed off his tongue: sharp one moment and so smooth as to be indistinguishable the next. He liked the thrill of hearing others speak it and knowing he could understand them. He checked out books from the school library and hid them under a loose board in the floor of Dudley's second bedroom, then read them whenever he could. The Dursleys had never learned Spanish; Vernon Dursley made a point to sneer at anyone that spoke a different language and mutter about how they should "learn to speak some ruddy English, the blasted foreigners" under his breath, Petunia preferred French, and Dudley was an idiot.

Harry kind of hated them for that. It was much too reminiscent of the way they treated any mention of the word 'magic', and that was just plain unacceptable. He didn't voice any of his thoughts aloud though; he rather liked his head where it was, thanks, and it's not like it would do any good anyway. If anything, Vernon would only scorn them more for their association with the 'Potter brat', and Dudley would probably punch his nose in. It didn't hurt nearly so much as it had when he'd worn glasses, but it still wasn't what one would call pleasant.

2. Harry liked speaking to snakes for the same reason that he loved speaking Spanish. The Dursleys would never understand the hissed insults of the reptiles at the zoo, whereas Harry could not only understand but respond as well. Not that he did; doing so would result in another stint in his cupboard, and he'd only just gotten out of the punishment for levitating a plate of orange slices. He hadn't meant to, of course, but magic very rarely did what he wanted.

3. Harry didn't like magic; he loved it with a limitless passion. In the dead of night, while the Dursleys were snoring raucously in their beds upstairs, he sat amongst the spiders and strained to make something-anything-happen. Once he'd managed to conjure a small, ethereal wisp of light that had dissipated around early morning. Another time he'd accidentally set the edge of his mattress on fire; Vernon had come storming downstairs at the first whiff of smoke, whereupon Harry had been summarily punished for "playing with matches". He'd turned his left sock blue in a fit of-startlingly effective-whimsy, and just last week he'd exploded a slice of double fudge cake right in Dudley's fat face all the way from his cupboard! Unfortunately he'd still been blamed for it, but his only real regret at the time was that he hadn't gotten to see his cousin's expression.

He healed fairly quickly, too. None of the other kids at school could suffer from a broken arm one day and be perfectly fine the next. (He imagined it was from all the practice he got by hanging around Dudley, who hated running with a passion but had no qualms about sending Piers to chase after Harry in his stead. Piers, the rat-faced git, likewise had no qualms about holding Harry's arms behind his back while Dudley hit him. Harry had enough qualms about the situation in general for both of them, but for some reason his opinion was never taken into account.)

Perhaps the most interesting development thus far was his hair. For as long as he could remember Harry had been cursed with exceptionally resilient and extraordinarily messy black hair. (He would never forget the day that Petunia had dragged him to the stylist's in desperation, only to have to take the walk of shame back out when the frazzled stylist had pronounced Harry a 'hopeless case' and closed shop three hours early.) Once Petunia had shaved him practically bald, save for an unruly fringe to cover the scars across his forehead, and Harry had awoken the next morning to find it looking much the same as it had before she'd touched it.

He'd gotten in trouble for that.

Now, however, Harry found himself with a different problem entirely. No matter what he did, his hair would not. Stay. Black.

The first time his hair had changed colors, he'd ventured to the bathroom to wash his hands before he made breakfast and found his rather startled green eyes were surrounded on all sides by a matching mop of verdant curls. After ten minutes of frantic attempts to change it back to his normal raven black, Harry had succeeded only in lightening the green to a pale turquoise. The Dursleys were apoplectic when they found out; that night Vernon returned with freshly purchased bleach and black hair dye, shoved Harry's head under the sink, slopped the bleach into his hair, and shoved him into his cupboard. He'd left him there long enough for it to begin to burn, then dragged him back into the bathroom and rinsed it out. Harry had been horrified to discover his hair had turned a sickly, patchy blend of white and grey, and as a result had applied the black hair dye without a fuss.

Two days later he'd woken up in his cupboard drowning in two-foot, violently frizzy, fire-truck red tresses, and Vernon had yelled himself hoarse. After almost a month of repeated incidents, during which he was locked in his cupboard, subjected to more hair products than he cared to think about, shaved bald twice, and concussed (courtesy of Vernon's temper), the Dursleys eventually admitted defeat and resigned themselves to several weeks of being the newest bit of gossip due to, of all things, flamboyant hair colors.

Harry had become rather fond of his indecisive locks; at worst they upset the Dursleys, and at best they upset the Dursleys and looked rather fantastic besides. His favorite so far had been the day when his hair had turned a speckled amber-sable; it had stuck straight out from his head, almost like the characters on Dudley's cartoons when they played with electricity. Harry said he looked like a tropical bird. Vernon turned a rather repugnant shade of puce, said he looked like an impudent freak, and locked him in his cupboard. Harry spent the next several hours trying to become reticent and taciturn, only to fail miserably two days later when he unthinkingly proclaimed to the entire household that his new, bubblegum pink hair made him look ridiculous. (The sentiment was perhaps the first thing Vernon and Harry had ever been in agreement on; Harry later decided he could find it in his heart to love pink after all.) He'd only managed to obtain some semblance of control over his color-confused mop over the past three months. In an effort to return their obvious feelings of animosity, he had failed to mention the development to the Dursleys.

4. Harry liked cake. He found himself doubting that he would get any, though, despite the fact that today was his eleventh birthday. It wouldn't surprise him if the Dursley's had completely forgotten; it would surprise him even less if they simply didn't care.

Harry flicked his hair (fuschia: almost as good as pink when it came to sending his uncle into an incoherent rage) off his forehead, exposing the jagged, lightning bolt scar he'd received in the car crash that had killed his parents. The slightly raised flesh of his second scar (courtesy of the television incident) stretched for a good three inches across the upper-right portion of his forehead. Harry had found over the years that it was so close to his roots that it was hardly noticeable, especially when he shaded his hair the same pale pink. At any rate, the Dursley's had never noticed.

"The Dursleys never notice," Harry commented aloud. His cupboard didn't answer, not that he expected it to, and he went back to listening for the sound of the hall clock. The minute it chimed twelve would signal the end of his eleventh birthday.

The week had been decidedly odd. Four days ago there had been a letter in the mail. That in itself wasn't particularly unusual; Vernon often received bills, which he would then gripe about before yelling at Harry to "make yourself useful and clean out the tool shed, you little ingrate! Spoiled rotten, lazy as his parents, take him under our roof and what do we get? Nothing good, I tell you!" or some other sort of chore-related order. The letter wasn't a bill; it wasn't even addressed to Vernon. It was addressed to him, Harry James Potter in the Cupboard Under the Stairs, and it was the first piece of mail he had ever received in his life. Not that he'd actually 'received' it, per se, seeing as how Vernon had promptly turned a nasty purple color, snatched it from his hands, and thrown him bodily into the hall. But still! Mail, and to him!

Harry rubbed his cheek absentmindedly; it was still a bit sore from when Dudley had punched him in a brief fight over who got to listen at the keyhole while the letter was discussed. Dudley had won, of course, and he'd had to listen at the crack under the door instead while his aunt and uncle whispered about, in increasingly nonsensical sentences, the letter and its correlation to what they called 'his people'. (He had people? As far as he knew, the only 'people' that so much as attempted to tolerate him were batty old Ms. Figg from down the street and perhaps the mailman.)

Vernon had stormed out of the room several minutes later, his girth swinging dangerously, and tossed the letter into the open fire. The next morning there had been no less than twelve new letters stuffed in the mail slot; Harry had sprinted to reach them but had been stopped by his uncle, who punched him hard in the gut and set them on fire while he was still getting his breath back.

Winded but undeterred, Harry had hatched a plan to intercept the mailman the next morning before he even reached the front step. Vernon, however, anticipated him; Harry became aware of the fact only after he had trod all over his uncle, who had been lying in wait in a sleeping bag before the front door. Harry had ensconced himself safely in his cupboard before he could catch hold of him, and had resigned himself to coming up with a Plan B. He was temporarily distracted by the sound of hammering, and when he'd peeked his head out from his cupboard door he'd been greeted with the sight of Vernon boarding over the windows and doors. Harry decided his uncle had finally lost it when he chanced a look two hours later just in time to see him try to hammer a nail in with a piece of Aunt Petunia's fruitcake.

Yesterday had dawned bright and sunny. Vernon was alarmingly cheerful, and had hummed under his breath while he buttered his toast. Harry had surmised that he had been under the impression that the mail wouldn't be able to reach the house if it couldn't make it through the doors, which only made it all the more amusing when close to a hundred letters had suddenly poured out of the fireplace and exploded across the room. In the ensuing chaos Harry had managed to snag a letter, only to have it ripped from his fingers by a rather crazed-looking Vernon. He would've argued if not for the fact that his uncle had appeared to be ripping off bits of his mustache in stress, but in light of that information he'd decided to go hide in the cupboard for the second day in a row instead.

Today would be the fifth day of the Letter Barrage. Harry had been reluctant to venture out of his cupboard that morning; Vernon had been disturbingly quiet all day, and he knew from experience that was never a good sign. He'd gone out around lunch, though, and had noticed upon his perusal of the living room (there was a possibility, however small, that a letter had escaped his Aunt's fastidious cleaning) that the fireplace had been boarded up as well. Harry wondered curiously how they were expected to leave the house come Monday. Much of the day had been spent doing chores and being as unobtrusive as possible (years of avoiding Harry Hunting, a rather cruel and not remotely fun game invented by Dudley, had made it so that Harry had the art down to a science). No letters had arrived thus far, and there were less than five minutes to go until the end of his eleventh birthday. Harry wondered, with a muted sense of disappointment, if he had missed his chance.

Someone knocked on the door.

Harry froze, tensing instinctively. Who would be out and about this late at night in a place like Little Whinging? It had never happened before.

He held himself perfectly still and listened to the snores of his aunt and uncle.

**Boom. Boom. Boom. **

The wheezing snorts abruptly stuttered and stopped, replaced by an irritated grumble of, "Who the bloody hell is knocking now? It's practically midnight!"

"Now Vernon, I'm sure it's just someone asking for directions."

"Well it's bloody inconsiderate, if you ask me! Couldn't come calling at a decent hour, could they?" Vernon's discontent grumbling became more distinct as he thundered down the stairs and passed the cupboard where Harry lay listening intently.

"Who's there?" Vernon yelled through the closed door; Harry wondered why he didn't bother to open it, then remembered the boards.

"Hagrid, Groundskeeper at Hogwarts School 'a Witchcraft 'n Wizardry. I've come ta' give young 'arry 'is letter."

Harry had about one second to realize that the speaker was male and had a distinctive sort of accent before Vernon exploded into a furious diatribe. "NOW YOU LISTEN HERE, YOU, WE TOLD THAT MAN LOUD AND CLEAR THAT WE WANTED NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR RUDDY KIND AND WE DAMN WELL MEANT IT! IF YOU'RE NOT OFF MY LAWN IN THE NEXT FIVE SECONDS I'LL SUE YOU FOR EVERY PENNY YOU OWN! STAY AWAY FROM MY FAMILY!"

There was a moment of silence, during which all he could make out was labored breathing as Vernon strode back towards the stairs, and then there was a thundering crash. Harry flung open the cupboard door, ignoring his sense of self-preservation in light of his insatiable curiosity, and was shocked to discover the door had been blown clean off its hinges. A giant, bearded stranger was backlighted against the newly created entrance; he had to bend to clear the doorframe, and Harry found himself stepping back and instinctively trying to sink into the shadows.

The man straightened, tangled brown hair brushing the curve of the ceiling. Vernon, who appeared to have been halfway up the steps when the before the door has unceremoniously destroyed, made a high pitched whistling sound; Harry thought he sounded like a deflating balloon. Then he thought that maybe he should be running, or something, because he was fairly certain this 'Hagrid' could flick his head straight off his shoulders.

Before he could make a move to unobtrusively slink back into the cupboard, the throaty, deep timbre of the man's voice filled the room. "Is that you, 'arry? Well I'll be, grown righ' up there, haven't yeh? I 'aven't seen you since you were a baby! How've you been, then?" The giant lumbered forward, tucking a rather tattered looking umbrella under his arm as he went, and Harry resigned himself to an early grave.

What came next, however, was not a prepubescent death, but a knee-buckling shoulder pat and a sudden, smothering hug. Harry briefly reassessed the situation, then hesitantly returned the squeeze. The giant ('Hagrid,' Harry reminded himself) set him back on his feet and blew his nose noisily into what appeared to be a small tablecloth masquerading as a handkerchief. Harry found himself intrigued.

"NOW SEE HERE!" Vernon roared, seemingly snapping out of his previous stupor. Harry, who at that point had forgotten his uncle entirely, turned to see all three of the Dursleys crowded, wide-eyed, around the staircase. Vernon appeared to be turning a sort of brick-red color that contrasted with his puce bathrobe in the most unflattering way possible. "WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT THEN? I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW YOU ARE BREAKING AND ENTERING, AND I-"

"Ah, shut your gob, Dursley," Hagrid growled, clapping his hand against Harry's back in a show of support; Harry concentrated on not flying face first into the floor. He turned to Harry, pulling a-was that an owl?- from his coat pocket. He untied a letter from it's leg-it WAS an owl!-and extended it to him. Harry blinked.

"Here ya are, then," Hagrid said happily. "Your 'ogwarts letter. Migh' be a bi' crumpled, sorry 'bout tha'."

Harry, fingers trembling slightly, took the letter with an expression of reverence. He was vaguely aware of rising voices in the background, including those of his aunt and uncle, but ignored it in favor of splitting the seal and removing a thin sheet of parchment.

Thirty-two seconds later, his life shifted. There was a school for magic-A SCHOOL FOR MAGIC!-and he, Harry James Potter, was being invited to go. He was a wizard. A WIZARD. He wouldn't have to live with the Dursleys! He could learn how to-to make lights, and change sock colors, and explode cakes with others just like him! He let out a disbelieving trill of laughter. He was going to HOGWARTS! (And hell if the name itself wasn't interesting all on its own.)

Harry snapped out of internal revel just in time to hear Hagrid let loose a furious roar. He whipped around to take in the sight of his uncle, face ashen, watching as Hagrid easily ripped a gun from his hands (so THAT'S what had been in the package) and twisted it like a balloon animal.

"Ye' WHAT?! Lily an' James Potter, die in a car crash?! They were MURDERED, ya' bloody muggle, murdered by one o' the mos' dangerous wizards of the century, and you claim they died 'n a CAR CRASH?!"

"Murdered?" Harry repeated numbly, eyes going wide. Hagrid turned, startled, then nodded gravely.

"Aye. By You-Know-Who, the darkest wizard of th' century. They died protectin' you and fightin' for wha' they believed in. Not in a bloody car crash!" The last part was said with a tone of such disgust that even Vernon took a quick step back. "He killed 'em both, poor Lily 'n James, an' then he turned his wand on you. But somethin' happened tha' night, somethin' nobody had ever seen before, and instead a' killin' yeh, he died. Yeh killed 'im, and you was only a baby. The darkest wizard of the age, and it was you, 'arry, tha' stopped 'im."

"Me?" Harry whispered. "I did that?"

"Aye, yeh did," Hagrid said quietly, sagely.

Harry felt vaguely ill. He had KILLED someone, the same someone that had killed his parents, and he couldn't even remember how he'd done it. What the bloody hell was wrong with him?Hagrid, seemingly unaware of his increasingly dark train of thought, watched him steadily.

"He won't be going." In the aftermath of the sudden onslaught of information Harry had completely forgotten about the Dursleys. Vernon, face ashen and mustache quivering, was standing protectively in front of his family. "We've tried for years to quash that nonsense out of him, and I won't be letting you take him off to that bloody SCHOOL and undoing all our good work!"

"Lily 'n James Potter's son, not go to 'ogwarts? Yeh're mad, Dursley. He'll go and he'll learn."

"We won't pay for it."

"Yeh won't be needin' to."

Vernon turned magenta. Harry grimaced.

It had taken just over an hour for the Dursleys to go back to bed. They huddled in Dudley's bedroom, communicating in frantic, hushed whispers that traveled down the stairs and into the living room. Harry was lying on the armchair; he may've hated the Dursleys, but he didn't want them dead, and somehow he doubted that mentioning he'd slept in a boot cupboard for the first eleven years of his life would make Hagrid particularly pleased. He found he rather liked the man. His opinion had no doubt been helped along when Hagrid had reached into his enormous overcoat and pulled out a (slightly squashed) chocolate cake, complete with "Happy Birthday, Harry" written in white frosting on the top. It was the first birthday cake he had ever been given, and even squashed it was still delicious.

Hagrid was asleep on the couch; his legs hung off the end and it sagged under his weight. He'd said that they would go shopping in the morning at a place called Diagon Alley. Upon hearing this Harry had briefly entertained a secret fantasy that 'Diagon' was really 'dragon' in Hagrid's thick accent, and they would in actuality be going off to purchase mythical beasts.

He lay quietly, mind churning and eyes glittering in the moonlight streaming through the window. He was a wizard. He was also, apparently, a celebrity and the supposed defeater of the Dark Lord Voldemort. (Hargid had written the name down on a spare napkin; when Harry had read it aloud he'd jumped so high that he'd almost broken the couch).

He wasn't quite sure how he felt about all that. He didn't feel like a hero; as far as he knew, heroes didn't get swirlies every Thursday in the public toilets, and they didn't explode cake in their cousins' faces no matter how much they wanted to. Harry had no allusions as to his morals; they were high, but he was willing to bend them a bit in light of mistreatment. At times he could be just as cruel as Dudley-crueler, even, seeing as how he actually had some ingenuity-and even if he only utilized the cruelty in response to mistreatment it still counted. How could he possibly be a hero? He couldn't even begin to imagine himself saving cities in lurid spandex and catching falling ladies in midair. Maybe he was one of the knight-type heroes? He didn't want to slay a dragon.

He wasn't a firefighter. He had never been a policeman, a secret agent, or one of those people that saved the day during stick-ups at banks. He was only eleven, and he didn't know a thing about protecting people. So far, the only person he'd ever really protected was himself.

Normally he would've dismissed the entire notion immediately, but Hagrid…Hagrid had given him the LOOK. It was the same look he'd used to give his teachers, the other kids at school, the librarian; it was the look that you gave someone who you thought could help you. He had hoped, for years, that someone would see him and KNOW, and then they would whisk him away from the Dursleys in a wave of compassion and comfort. They'd love him and feed him ice cream, and they'd help him with his homework when he got stuck.

No one had ever figured it out, of course, and when he'd realized they never would the revelation had left him feeling broken. How could he possibly inflict the same emotion on Hagrid; Hagrid, who had brought him his letter, given him his first birthday cake, and was going to take him shopping just the next day?

Harry's fist tightened. He resolved, then and there, that no matter how hard he had try and how much he had to give, he would be the hero that Hagrid believed him to be. If he had to go and fight dragons or put out fires or whatever being a wizarding hero entailed, he'd do it and he'd do it well. People were going to know him; people were going to look to him for things he couldn't even begin to understand, all because of something that he couldn't even remember doing. They would expect him to be an icon for goodness and the paragon of righteousness, and he, Harry, would be responsible for whether or not he met their expectations.

His eyes glowed eerily in the darkness of the living room, determination turning them a luminous emerald. Well then. He wouldn't disappoint.


	3. The Weasleys and the Steam Engine

Harry stared at the pale hand extended towards him, trying rather unsuccessfully to mask his distaste. The boy-Malfoy, and if memory served the first name was something to do with constellations-was snobbish, scornful of generally everyone, and obsessed with blood to the point where Harry had begun to wonder if he wasn't some sort of child vampire. He was like a smaller, blonder version of Dudley. Harry made his decision.

"I think I can decide who's the 'right sort' on my own, thanks."

Malfoy looked as if he'd swallowed a lemon. Before he could reply, Madam Malkin, the kindly shopkeeper, whisked Harry off the stool and towards the front of the robe shop to make his purchase. He could feel the boy's gaze burning his back as he went.

Diagon Alley, while disappointingly dragon-free, was undeniably the most fascinating place Harry had ever visited. That wasn't saying much, seeing as how he'd grown up with the Dursleys, but he still saw fit to tell Hagrid anyway. The groundskeeper beamed proudly, puffing out his chest and jumping into a long-winded and heavily accented speech on Diagon Alley's history, the different types of people that frequented it, and its relation to Albus Dumbledore.

After the several hours they had spent together Harry had come to the uneasy realization that Hagrid practically worshipped the ground the mysterious man walked on. Harry could pick up a book on great wizards and Hagrid would launch into a spiel about the benevolence and omniscience of the great and magnificent Chief Mugwump of Britain with undue enthusiasm. If Harry made a remark about the candy shop, Hagrid would immediately tell him, in no uncertain terms, that Albus Dumbledore was a man who liked his lemon drops (and weren't those a muggle sweet? He could've sworn he'd seen Dudley eating them before). Harry could make an offhand remark about his determination to excel in magic and Hagrid would make an tell him about various spells before informing him that Dumbledore was "ruddy brilliant" at magic and had once defeated the Dark Lord Grindelwald in a duel to the death. Wizards and witches alike were awed by his humbleness, by his munificence, by his self-sacrificing ways….

When Harry finally met the rumored Lord of the Light, he was either going to go into shock from overexposure to his mere presence, or (and he found this infinitely more likely) he was going to be so fed up with the whole business that he'd punch him in the head.

Harry was willing to forgive Hagrid his obsession; given time, he could probably even find it strangely endearing. Hagrid could do no wrong, because-and here Harry paused to scratch the snowy white feathers of his newest companion-Hagrid had given Harry an owl. He had never had a pet before, unless of course one counted the spiders in his cupboard. There had always been a sort of lingering fear that Dudley would kill anything he owned out of spite, and he loathed the suffering of innocent animals.

"What'd yeh decide ta name yer owl, 'arry?"

"Hedwig," Harry answered, craning his neck to peer into Hagrid's broadly smiling features. "Thank you for getting her for me. You didn't have to."

"Nah, she were a gift!" Hagrid protested. Harry sank back into his thoughts. It had quickly become obvious to him that Hagrid was the sort of person that liked to give and yet expected nothing in return; a rare sort of man, to be sure, and Harry found that he liked him all the more because of it. Any doubts he'd had about rejecting the friendship of Draco Malfoy were dispelled; anyone that could look at a person as amiable as Hagrid with disdain was no ally of his.

Molly Weasley absently caught hold of her youngest son's shirt collar and guided him out of the way of a rather elderly couple traversing the platform. The muggles meandered peacefully past, eyes sliding over her family without seeing them. If she was going to be announcing their entrance onto the platform at the top of her lungs in a building filled with muggles then the least she could do was cast a couple of Notice-me-not charms. Normally she wouldn't care for such indiscretion, but Albus had insisted that her family befriend the young Potter.

'Poor boy,' she thought, the Headmaster's previous warnings about the state of his home life floating back to the forefront of her thoughts. She'd known, of course, that conditioning the child was necessary; the entire plan hinged on Harry's absolute loyalty. Loving, charismatic parents would only succeed in getting in the way, and they would no doubt be heartbroken if the child were to have a mishap during his training. So young Harry Potter had been placed with Lily's magic-hating muggle relatives, so that when the time came for him to escape his 'family' and arrive at Hogwarts he would love it unconditionally. It was shocking, the lengths to which one would go for something they cared for.

"Don't worry, Gin, we'll send you loads of mail."

"Mail and the head off that barmy old statue on the fourth corridor. Right laugh, that one. Always going on about finding his feet."

"You'll do no such thing," said warningly, and got twin grins for her trouble. She did a quick head count and returned to scanning the platform for a hint of James' hair and Lily's eyes.

"Why can't we wait for Percy on the other side? He's taking ages and I want to see the steam engine."

Molly absentmindedly ruffled Ron's hair; he wrinkled his nose and squirmed out of her grasp with an indignant cry of, "Mum! You're messing it up!" The twins snickered.

"I'm sure he'll be here any minute, and it's best we stick together. The platform can get a bit crowded, and I wouldn't want him to have to board the train without getting to say good-bye," she lied distractedly. Percy, after having been judged as responsible and grown-up enough to know the truth, had been made fully aware of the plans concerning Harry James Potter. At the moment he was hiding behind a pillar across the room, and would appear precisely when Harry did. Molly would then announce, loudly and to everyone within hearing distance, that it was time to cross Platform 9 and Three Quarters to board the Hogwarts Express. The child would hear her, and any chance of his getting lost would be moot. If Harry approached her, she would welcome him in the most maternal way possible; he would be drawn, Dumbledore had explained, to the idea of the mother that he never go to have. Even if he didn't speak to her, Molly was confident in the assurance that Ron's insatiable fascination with the famed Harry Potter would lead him to seek him out and befriend him anyway. Harry, who no doubt had very little experience with friendships, would jump at the chance. Dumbledore was convinced the plan was infallible; that alone meant it was practically destined to occur.

Molly frowned as the raven hair she'd been following with her eyes turned out to be the toupee of a rather elderly gentleman heading to Platform 10. Perhaps the child had been held up in traffic?

A flash of emerald-her eyes darted sideways and zeroed in on the unmistakable visage of Harry James Potter. There was no one else he could conceivably be; the hair was reminiscent of James' own wild bird nest, and that shade of green had only ever belonged to Lily. Molly caught Percy's eye from across the atrium, and he immediately straightened and began to wind his way through the crowd.

"Ah, there he is." The relief in her tone wasn't faked; for a moment she had almost thought the boy wasn't going to come. What would she have done if Harry had decided not to come to Hogwarts?

The heads of her respective family members snapped up, unaware that she hadn't been referring to her third-eldest son. Ron glared fiercely and opened his mouth, but the twins beat him to the punch.

"Get lost on the way to the bathrooms, Perce?"

"Don't be ridiculous Gred. He was probably off bettering the world of man. Were you bossing little old ladies about how to properly board the train? Checking their credentials, informing them of their rights and the rules during the passage-"

"Now you're the one being ridiculous. Percy would never stop at just old ladies. Were you conducting everyone to their seats, Perce? No need to be modest. We won't laugh."

"I will," Ron muttered, and received a highly affronted glare in response. Fred and George clapped supportive hands on his back, the result of which was that he went staggering through the platform and onto the other side.

"After you-"

"-brother dear."

"FRED! GEORGE!"

The twins grinned cheekily.

"Sorry Mum."

"Just making sure he has-"

"-the ultimate Hogwarts experience."

Molly growled, but it fell on deaf ears; the twins had already shoved through the barrier. She put aside her irritation for the moment; unlike the twins, any failure on her part would end in more than a mere scolding. Her miffed expression belied her inner nerves; a slip-up now could wreck plans years in the making. Molly gently took hold of Ginny's hand and said loudly," Now come along, Ginny dear, it's time to cross over Platform 9 and Three Quarters. Don't want to miss the send-off, do we?"

She felt more than saw Harry's attnetion snap onto her brood. Out of the corner of her eye she watched him hesitate, then begin to slowly pick his way through the throng of people. The crowd easily swallowed his diminutive form; Molly forcibly suppressed her tension at the unlikely but possible chance that someone would whisk him away while he was out of her sight.

Then, suddenly, he was there. A small, nervous voice issued from somewhere near her left knee, and she looked down to lock gazes with the most brilliant shade of green she had ever seen.

"Um, excuse me, I don't mean to be a bother, but... it's just that I'm not really sure how to get to my train, and I couldn't help but overhear you mention Platform 9 and Three Quarters…."

"Oh, hello dear. This must be your first year at Hogwarts. It's Ron's first time as well; he's waiting on the other side of the platform. We were all so proud when he got his letter!" The pride wasn't faked; Molly wished she could've bought a new racing broom in celebration, but with the sudden tax inflation….

She took in the child's wide-eyed expression and chuckled good-naturedly, instinctively slipping into her natural motherly persona. The boy was much too thin-practically skin and bones-and could no doubt do with some fattening up. With any luck he and Ron would be fast friends soon enough, and her youngest son could bring him home for Christmas.

Harry nodded his head shyly and gave her a sheepish smile. Molly felt a pang of pity; the poor, sweet dear! Merlin only knew what he would have to go through to defeat the Dark Lord, and he was still so small! If she'd done the math correctly, he was even younger than Ronald; Molly had a sudden, inexplicable mental image of Ron, freckles lurid against his pale face, trying to face down the darkest wizard in a century. She balked at the image, jolting back to earth and staring down at the bird-like, trusting child in front of her. Guilt lodged itself beneath her gut.

The memory of Dumbledore's sorrowful countenance swam into view. He had intoned, gravely, the sacrifices begot by war; he had told them, regret etched in every fold of his wizened features, exactly how much they may have to give. Harry was a child, but he was also the only chance they had against He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named; in a contest between the lives and wellbeing of her family and the prophesized son of Lily and James…. Ginny clenched small fingers in the hem of her mother's robes, peeking out timidly at the strange new boy with doe-like chestnut eyes. Molly stroked a hand soothingly across her head.

The choice, in the end, wasn't much of a choice at all.

"Now then, dear, you'll just be needing to walk through the bricks between platforms Nine and Ten." Harry Potter eyed the wall uncertainly, his dubious expression distressingly similar to one that Ron had worn that very morning when the twins had attempted to persuade him to sample a cockroach cluster. Molly quashed her sense of guilt; Albus had called it a "necessary sacrifice", and if Dumbledore believed Harry's involvement in the war was inevitable then so did she.

"If you're not feeling very confident it's normally better to get a running start. Here, watch Percy."

At the sound of his name, Percy straightened his robes and took on a brisk, rather pompous trot. For a moment it appeared as if he would smash into the barrier, but before he could he suddenly vanished into thin air. Harry's eyes widened to the size of cantaloupes, and his jaw dropped open and onto his chest. He looked faintly adorable, and she had to resist the urge to close his mouth for him.

After a minute of silent gaping he swallowed hard. "Ah…thank you, Ms…."

"Mrs. Weasley, dear, and it was no trouble. Now, off you go; I'll be right behind you." Her cheer didn't seem to bolster his courage, but after a brief second of internal struggle he wheeled around his trolley (A snowy white owl hooted irritably at the sudden movement) and set off at a steady jog for the barrier. He gradually began to pick up speed until, with a suppressed wince, he slid smoothly through the barrier and onto the other side.

Molly breathed a quiet sigh of relief; he had made it. "Come along, Ginny. Don't want to miss saying good-bye to your brothers, do we?" She untangled her daughter's chubby fingers from her robes, fielding the sudden influx of curious questions about the "boy with the green eyes, Mum, I've never seen him before" and crossing over and into view of the Hogwarts Express.

Molly Weasley, Harry thought, was quite possibly the most beautiful woman in the world. It didn't matter that she was a bit plump, as it were, or that her voice was perhaps a tad grating at times. What mattered was that she exuded an aura of protectiveness and motherly care, so much so that Harry, unused to such a high level of attention, had long ago drifted into a sort of adoring daze, buoyed up on a wave of gentle words.

Molly clucked and tutted over the state of his clothes (Dudley had outgrown the shirt he was currently wearing years ago, but to be fair, Dudley had outgrown boys twice his size), his hair (Harry decidedly didn't mention the amount of effort it had taken to get his hair into its current state; he had looked into the mirror that morning only to discover that he had a single, canary yellow strand poking out of the center of his otherwise completely bald skull), and his notable thinness.

Harry found the comment on his weight rather irksome, though he hid his scowl in an attempt to spare Mrs. Weasley's feelings. After years of surviving on the meager rations provided for him by the Dursleys, he had developed an unfortunate repulsion concerning breakfast (early eating made him queasy) and any sort of rich food (once he had snuck a slice of Dudley's double-chocolate birthday cake, and approximately twenty minutes later had been found heaving violently into the open toilet bowl). He had only ever been allowed his own portions once the rest of the Dursleys had finished eating. Vernon had a voracious approach to anything British and edible, and Harry had long suspected that Dudley hadn't gone more than two hours without eating since he had learned how to chew his own food; he had become rather used to smaller caloric intakes as a result. Just because he didn't gorge himself like his glutton of an uncle-

"I swear, George, they just get smaller every year."

"Why Fred, I do believe you're right. Just think: an entire generation of homunculi! A century from now they'll be knee-high, and they'll speak in small, squeaky voices. It'll be like listening to boiling kettles year-round."

"They already sound like that. Just listen to Ronniekins."

Mrs. Weasley turned on the twins, face red, and Harry turned his attention to 'Ronniekins'. The boy in question appeared to be around his age, though Harry had always been rather poor at judging that sort of thing. His robes looked rather worn, and he had a smudge on the tip of his nose; Ron whirled on his brothers, eyes murderous, and began to yell at them in a tone an octave higher than their own.

Harry liked him. He liked all the Weasleys, though he had yet to meet the father. He imagined that the man must have had a lot of patience, to grow up with so many children; either that or he was very, very good at ignoring people. They were all so…warm, in a way that he had never really seen up close before; even when whispering furiously at her identically unrepentant sons, it was obvious to him that Mrs. Weasley still cared for them. She still straightened their collars and absentmindedly fixed their hair, and she never once hit them. Vernon would have clouted him through a wall if he'd put on such an insubordinate attitude.

Harry swept an eye over the platform, catching sight of Draco's gleaming hair further down. He was standing with a rather aristocratic looking man wielding a rather ostentatious, dragon-head cane and an expression of thinly-veiled disdain; beside him was a slender woman-Draco's mother, judging form the similar features-with icy blue eyes and skin like porcelain. They stood quietly apart from the others, radiating reserved poise and cold superiority. Harry decided to ignore their general aura of condescension in favor of noticing that their hair was all a matching shade of white-blond. Was the trait recessive? He hadn't seen it very often in adults; as he understood it, the color normally darkened with age.

They had been studying genes in school the other day; he thought he might like science, or at least he had liked the brief overview they had been given during class. Judging by the titles of the books he had purchased-_History of Magic, Introduction to the Dark Arts_-he probably wouldn't get a chance to learn much more of it while at Hogwarts, though, which was a tad disappointing. He would trade all the science in the world to meet more people like Mrs. Weasley, but it would still be nice to know if that shade of blond would've still been passed on to Draco if his father had been, say, a brunette-

Sensing his inspection, the man's head snapped up, their gazes locking unerringly. Harry froze, startled, and whipped back around, ostensibly to watch the twins-Fred and George, Ron had called them- antagonize Ron. He felt the Malfoy Senior's eyes linger on him for several more minutes after, but didn't dare to look up for fear of being caught staring again.

The shrill whistle of the steam engine drew him sharply out of his thoughts; Mrs. Weasley paused in her hissed tirade to sigh irritably before pulling the twins into quick hugs with orders to "-be careful, and for your own sakes I better not get another letter detailing that you've-you've set fire to the toilets, or gone 'round by the Forbidden Forest again-"

"Brilliant idea, Mum!"

"Straight up genius! Now I know where we got it from!"

"Don't you DARE-"

"I don't want them to go! It isn't fair!" cried out what Harry assumed to be Ron's younger sister. She looked like a miniature copy of her mother, save for the fact that her face was currently screwed up with tears. Harry softened immediately, feeling rather sorry for her. "I want to go with them!"

"Don't cry, Gin, you'll get your turn-"

"Yeah, and we'll send you mail every day until then."

"We'll send you a Hogwarts toilet seat-"

The rest of what they said was cut off as the train whistled for the second time; thick black smoke began to curl lazily out of the front. Harry wrapped one hand firmly around the handle of his trunk, grasped the top of Hedwig's cage in the other, and began to make his way to the loading door.

"Good-bye…it was nice meeting you," he added uncomfortably, feeling suddenly off-balance, and Mrs. Weasley looked up in surprise. Two seconds later he was engulfed in an all-encompassing hug.

"Have fun at Hogwarts, dear, and don't forget to write. You're welcome at the Burrow anytime." Harry nodded, not trusting himself to speak. The Dursleys certainly never hugged him, and they didn't welcome him places, either, even if he didn't quite know what Mrs. Weasley would be doing in a burrow. Wasn't that a sort of hole? Perhaps wizards were like hobbits, like from that movie that Dudley had watched once before he decided that he preferred guns and racecars to dragons and dwarfs. That sort of burrow actually sounded rather cozy.

He tightened his arms in a quick, experimental squeeze before she released him and was off to tend to the other children, wiping the smudge off of Ron's nose (much to his protest) and comforting Ginny, who had begun to cry in earnest. He staggered away, dragging his trunk up the steps and onto the train just as it shuddered and began to move, slowly, beneath him. Harry glanced out into the open air as the train began to pick up speed; Ginny Weasley ran alongside it, laughing and crying, and the flaming red hair of Molly Weasley disappeared behind the crowd. The train made an abrupt turn, and the platform was suddenly obscured by the thick, grey walls of a tunnel.

He felt rather bereft and forlorn. How long would it be, he wondered, before he would get to see them again?

"Hey, mate, there's an empty compartment. That is, if you wanted to-I mean,I-" Ron was standing, half-in and half-out of an open doorway, cheeks flushing in embarrassment. Harry felt his stomach flip in excitement; Ron had invited him-him!-to sit with him. That hadn't happened in…well, forever, really, since Dudley had always been rather keen on walloping anyone who deigned to speak to him in anything less than a derogatory manner. And what had he been thinking? There were Weasleys here, on the train with him; he could see them right now.

"Sure," he replied, pleased when his voice didn't betray his inner reveling, and tugged his things into the compartment. Ron grinned widely, looking relieved, and vanished back inside.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and he quivered. They were off to Hogwarts.

All credit for the characters and plot of Harry Potter goes to the ever fabulous J.K Rowling. So mote be it.


	4. Pain and the School Called Hogwarts

"You could be great, you know, it's all here in your head, and Slytherin would help you on your way to greatness."

Harry Potter had never been 'great', before. He'd been spectacular a ("spectacular mistake, Vernon, taking the boy in, and now look what's come of it." ).He'd been incredible ("-incredible how quiet he is, and then suddenly he's found on the school roof as calm as you please, no way to get up there even, not with the fire escape so rusted up. I just think, perhaps, he may be acting out for a reason, Mr. Dursley-") Once he'd even been amazing ("-amazing, the lengths the little brat will go to just to make our lives miserable, the ungrateful, rotten boy-").

No, Harry Potter had never been great; if he had, he simply couldn't remember it. He supposed that it all came down to what he wanted, in the end, which was an unusual and highly unprecedented situation indeed. Slytherin would make him…strong, and witty, and powerful, whereas Gryffindor would give him….

He peeked out from beneath the tattered, ragged brim of the Sorting Hat. Hundreds of eyes stared back, mouths moving silently with hissed whispers that he couldn't hear. His eyes alighted on double flashes of red; the Weasley twins watched him curiously from his left. On his right was the Slytherin table; Draco Malfoy sat smugly between the two rather stout boys that had been surreptitiously flanking him all night. He recalled the cool, aloof superiority of the other boy as he had stood, hand outstretched, and apprised him of Hagrid's apparently predestined place at the feet of those he considered worthy. He thought of Albus Dumbledore, the revered Headmaster of Hogwarts, and of how his eyes seemed to press in at his mind whenever he met them. He considered Hagrid, who had never once claimed to be 'great' in any way, yet had bought him an ice cream and Hedwig out of the goodness of his heart.

Harry made his decision. If Draco Malfoy was greatness, then he wanted nothing to do with it.

"Pity, it would've suited you well. But if you're sure, I suppose it had better be GRYFFINDOR!" The Hat's shout rang out clear and loud; the Gryffindor table seemed to explode with energy. Harry carefully removed the hat from his head and descended the platform to the thundering applause of the Great Hall. He never once looked back.

During the duration of his lifetime Harry had been the receiving party of quite a lot of what most people considered pain. After the incident with the television set, he had become acutely aware of the magnitude of his healing abilities; it was astonishing, how often he had unintentionally cured himself of various maladies and injuries without giving it any special thought. For a while he had even flinchingly experimented a bit; eventually he had gone about his self-administered tests without so much as cringing.

In several of Dudleys' rather gory, more action-packed movies, the characters had undergone severe crucibles during which they were brutally tortured for information. When he was younger, Harry had assumed they had given in due to the pain; there were limits, after all, to what the human mind could endure. After several years of his own form of self-inflicted torture, Harry had reevaluated his previous presumption. Pain could be mastered, if one had the will and the experience. No, it was nothing more or less than fear that had made them succumb to their interrogators' whims. The terror and horror of losing a limb that could never grow back, tasting your own mortality, of being sure beyond doubt that your tormentors could personally see to it that you'd never walk another step-THAT was what made the torture real. Agony was much harder to ignore when you knew the damage it brought with it was irreversible.

The stunning revelation had struck him several months after he turned nine. He had been feeling…off, lately, in a detached, blasé sort of way. It was as if nothing could touch him, and even if it did it wouldn't really matter anyway. He had gone about his chores as normal, humming tunelessly and fitfully under his breath; the clouds had rotated slowly overhead, bloated undersides blackened with the promise of imminent downpours.

He had been tugging forlornly at the scarce weeds dotting his aunt's garden; it wouldn't do to be caught outside in the rain before he was finished. He had known he wouldn't be done on time, though; water droplets had already begun to fall, dripping down his neck and under the rim of his T-shirt. He'd been dismayed; Vernon hated water on the floors. The next moment, he had known with absolute certainty that it didn't matter, because he wasn't going to go home at all.

At first the epiphany had sent him off-kilter: 'What? Not go home? But he always went home. If he didn't go home, where would he go?' Then the euphoria had hit; he could do anything, be anything, and no one would stop him because no one could. He was invincible, filled with new beginnings and possibilities, and surely that meant something grand.

Harry had stood, the gardening trowel dropping from his limp fingers to the freshly turned soil, and had cast about for a direction. Then he had decided that it didn't matter where he went (if simply because anywhere would do), brushed the dirt off on his jeans in a rather matter-of-fact manner, and promptly hopped the fence. Then he'd hopped the next, and the next, and the one after that, passing row after row of neat, tidy houses with painted white shingles and trim green lawns until they all begin to blur together into a giant, suburban mass. The world had promptly regained clarity when he'd felt his shoes smack onto pavement.

That had brought forth another thought: why wear shoes on such a lovely day of self-discovery? There had been rain all around him, and the world was so beautiful. He'd promptly unlaced them, dragging his now water-saturated socks off for good measure, and left them lying on the sidewalk. His shirt had been like a film over his skin; he'd dragged it over his head and let if fall in a sodden heap to the ground. A dog had barked; eyes had peered out of the neighbor's windows. He'd laughed, exhilaration making the air that whooshed into his chest feel cold as ice, and then he ran.

He'd only stopped running to climb, and soon he'd arrived at the top of his school building. It had been closed; no one was there that Saturday, no one to tell him to "get down from there, young man! Climbing school buildings is illegal and dangerous, what were you thinking?! You'll come down here at once and accompany me to the office. Rest assured we'll be having a talk with your family about what you've been up to!" A frisson of anger clouded his mind.

No one had believed him when he'd told them that he'd only meant to jump over some trash cans in his desperate attempts to escape Dudley. He knew now that he couldn't blame them. He'd blamed them then, though, in that moment when he'd felt like a God under the sky. He'd hated them for never listening, and he'd despised them all for turning a blind eye while he rotted at the Dursley's under the pretence of a healthy, happy child.

He'd sneered in self-disgust at the memory of his response to his preschool teacher-"Oh, 'm fine, I just tripped the other day. Just tripped, that's all…"-when she'd inquired after the finger-shaped bruise on his shoulder. He had never been able to alert someone to his situation; his mind had always balked at the very idea, shying away from it as if it was the stuff of nightmares. He could feel something inside his head, covering his thoughts, and it told him that telling would only bring pain.

That was before he'd really known pain, of course. He had become intimately acquainted with it only several minutes later, though, when in a sudden fit of terror-he would never be free, no one would ever know, and he HATED IT ALL, HATED IT-he'd taken the three steps separating him from the edge of the building and crossed into open air.

Harry knew the drop couldn't have lasted more than a couple of seconds, but in that moment-suspended above the slick pavement, every raindrop suddenly brought into frightening clarity-it had felt as if time itself had stopped to watch. Then he'd tilted forward, and the ground had sprung up to greet him.

It had been nothing like when he was seven; back then the shock had dulled the pain, and his time of consciousness had been mercifully brief. His experiments, too, had been so slight in comparison that they hadn't even factored into the equation of what true suffering felt like.

But when he jumped form the roof, he had felt everything: the jarring impact of his feet on the earth, the quivering collapse as his knees buckled under the strain, his body condensing until his hips were pushed to his ribs, his lungs crumpling under the onslaught of unyielding bone, the rush of blood running smoothly out of delicate veins….

Despite the shrieking, unparalleled torment, Harry had been unable to slip into unconsciousness. Perhaps it was because it hadn't been a head wound; maybe the cursed state of awareness had been due, in part, to his own contributions to his condition. Whatever the case, he had been incapable of escaping. Harry had lain in the throes of torment, gurgling helplessly until his spit frothed pink, with the rain burning his wounds. His state of cognizance had allowed him to feel what he had missed that time two years past: his vertebrae had slowly ground their way back into place, his hips crawled their way down to his lower abdomen, the blood forced itself backwards through his spazzing heart, and his twitching limbs realigned themselves with a grinding of bone against bone.

It had taken three hours of unspeakable anguish before Harry Potter had been fully healed. It had taken four more before he'd managed to gather the energy to move. Harry never explained to the Dursleys what he'd been up to or why he'd disappeared. They locked him in the cupboard for close to three weeks upon receiving a call from a neighbor several streets down inquiring about the sanity of their youngest ward and offering to return his discarded clothing. Harry hadn't protested. He hadn't said much of anything, actually; for around two years he'd been considered mute. It was a testament to his level of care that so few noticed; those who did assumed it was a sign of his rumored insanity.

Harry had known better; it was the mark of having known pain. How could he possibly bring into words and experience so unimaginably painful as…how could he talk to them when it felt as if his voice had died in his stead?

The world was exquisite, but it was as cruel as it was beautiful. He hadn't experimented since then; he hadn't needed to. He had healed without a single scar; he had nearly drowned in his own blood on that pavement, and no one was the wiser. It was as if the entire incident had never occurred. Harry would've believed it had only been a dream if not for the fact that he thought it impossible to imagine the feeling of his own bones breaking through his skin. The sound of it was distinctly unique, in the same way as watching your first death. You could try to fathom it, but your imaginings would fall short and empty as husks the second they were held against the reality.

He had felt something break a bit, inside of him. He had felt many things break, actually, the majority of them bones, but until then none of them had been in his mind. His humor had become more morbid; the children at school had become more alien and unapproachable than before. It felt as if there was a monster in his head, consummated by his flight from the roof and born in the cold loneliness of blood loss, and it wanted to draw him into its rabid games.

Harry could feel it there, pushing to be let out, but it could never reach him. It was trapped behind a thin, milky film; he knew, without asking, that he had been the one to put it there. He also knew that the film was kin to the tar-like veil that exuded the inexplicable impulse that kept him from telling anyone of his abuse at home; that one was most certainly NOT of his own creation. The films were located in a space in his mind that had been opened to him the day that he'd jumped. Harry was sure, without a doubt, that the space had been there before; it had simply lain dormant, or perhaps unnoticed, for years before then. Accessing it felt like…like learning, like the moment when he first managed multiplication or when he remembered the answer for a test. Eventually he'd come to the tentative conclusion that it was attached to his realm of 'thought', and was a sort of land of his own imaginings.

In the Thought Realm Harry could mold his surroundings to whatever he wanted. When he'd first found himself there, the night after the fall, he'd been sitting on a fourteen by fourteen foot patch of wooden floor. To the left had been an enormous iron grate; to the right had been two doors, seemingly leading to hallways that curved into nothing. There had been no ceiling above his head, nor walls at his front. The area around him had been nothing but blackness. His mind had balked at the idea, and he'd found himself gasping awake, covered in sweat and imprisoned in the dusty confines of his cupboard.

It had been several weeks later when he'd managed to access the room again. He had been dreaming of The Fall, of pain and suffering and oh God he couldn't take it please help someone please-and then suddenly he'd been sitting on the Dursley's living room rug. Harry hadn't been in the living room, though; he had been in the same room from before. The hearth had poured warmth into his skin, while an icy, whistling breeze had streamed out of the empty space where there should've been walls. Harry had been assaulted by the mental image of the wind picking him up and flinging him from the room; desperately, he'd squeezed his eyes shut and willed for safety. The wind had stopped. When he'd opened his eyes there had been bricks stacked in orderly rows before him, combining to form a thick, seemingly unbreakable fortress in the place where previously there had been nothing. It wasn't a hard leap to make; Harry had known, with the clarity that only surety can bring, that he was capable of changing the world-if the emptiness could be called a world-around him.

He'd built spiraling castles with spindly towers and peaked apexes, then covered them all in a fine layer of glittery black sand and slender tendrils of plantlife. Once he had summoned a fighter jet straight from the pages of his classroom textbook; it had hung forty feet above the ground, suspended as if by invisible strings, and cast shadows across the earth. Despite his best efforts it had remained frozen, though once he'd managed to drag it, with great effort of mind, about ten feet to the left. He'd left it there, backlighting his self-made castle like an iron moon. He brought forth a tower of bolts and iron, with ten stone steps curving along the base and up to an open window, then stretched it until he couldn't see the top. The steps had seemed to remain the same size, right up until he'd tried to ascend to the fourth one; he'd suddenly found himself thousands of miles up, six steps from the top and surrounded on all sides by unbroken emptiness.

The area around his imaginings was black and empty; there were no echoes when he spoke. Walking in the void made him feel as if he had missed a step on the way down the stairs; his heart seemed to drop out of his stomach, and his foot jolted down to a different level than he had expected. Harry had taken to conjuring himself a crumbling, mortared road whenever he felt like venturing off into nothingness; sometimes he'd sit, legs dangling over the edge, and listen to the sound of the unbroken silence.

Every instance he awoke from having spent time in the Nothing left him feeling more rested than ever before, but he also felt very…small. It was as if he had gone from being a God, creating everything and anything on whims and instinct, to a little boy in a far-too-big world. So he'd wait until night, and then fall back into the world of his own imagination. He added wood to the hearth, though it never seemed to run out. He erased the Dursley carpet and replaced it with a larger, royal blue one of his own creation.

He'd even walked down the empty corridors behind the two doors. The first, he'd found, led to the milky film. The second led to the one made of tar. He'd wondered for years how it had gotten there but hadn't dared to remove it for fear that he would upend his own block in the corridor next to it and release the monster; Harry had come to fear the beast was a manifestation of his own madness. If madness had been what had led him to leap off the roof of the school, its freedom could lead to nothing good. It took on a physical form and paced beyond the barrier, twisting and roiling in a shapeless maelstrom of discontent and unease. It would calm when he was near, though, and shape itself into an almost feline form. He would've called it a jaguar, judging by the faint outline he could make out through the murky barrier, but jaguars didn't have coats made of turbulent emotions. He could feel the energy rolling off of it from yards away, contorting and folding in on itself in frenetic spurts.

In a fit of dry, cynical humor, he'd christened it Hyde; he had felt it stir interestedly at the thought, and taken that as acquiescence to the naming. When he was bored he would tap at the floor by it's cage, and it would slink towards him, all teeth and claws and crazed giggles, until it was pressed against the barrier. He couldn't see it, not really, but he could feel it there beside him. He'd tried to talk to it, enquiring in a quivery, quailing voice if it was an insanity of his own making, but it didn't answer. The shield kept its responses to the decibels of whispers and murmers. Eventually he'd stopped trying and settled for sitting companionably alongside it. It was nice to have someone to relax by, even if said someone was the incarnation of insanity.

Years passed; Hyde seemed to grow in size. Strange, inexplicable occurrences followed Harry wherever he went. Then, one day, a letter came to the Dursley's addressed to his cupboard, and he was swept off his feet and into a world of magic….

His scar itched. He certainly didn't know WHY; one moment he had been laughing at a particularly amusing revelation of Ron Weasley's, and then the next his eyes had slid over to the staff table only to be followed by a sudden, sharp pang in his skull.

It wasn't anything Harry couldn't handle, of course, but it was rather annoying. Doubly so, considering that it had persisted all through the night and into the morning.

He had met several of his professors already. Snape was a git; Harry had decided immediately that he would employ the same tactics he often used on Petunia Dursley, who was likewise intelligent and vindictive in her own right. Two minutes into class it had become abundantly clear that Snape despised fools ("dunderheads", he had called them). As a result, Harry had decided to ascend to Dudley-esque levels of stupidity in an attempt to be as annoying as possible. It helped that he knew absolutely none of the material, and Snape seemed to have expected him to have read his textbooks beforehand. The professor seemed to reserve a particular sort of animosity for him, though Harry had no idea why. He couldn't recall having done anything wrong….Despite his best efforts he had still felt rather dismayed. Was he really so unlikeable? The sudden upsurgence of Hyde had him sufficiently distracted long enough for Neville, a rather hapless, nervous looking boy, to blow up a cauldron. The explosion had really been rather spectacular; everyone that came into contact with the scattered remains of the potion lost every fiber of hair on their heads while simultaneously sprouting tawny yellow fur over every other inch of their skin. Harry, who had been standing at the table next to Neville at the time (and probably would've had his head blown off if Ron hadn't tackled him to the floor), had been forced to endure a tongue lashing from a furious Snape. The professor seemed to think he had allowed Neville to botch the potion; Harry hadn't been quite sure where Snape had been coming from, seeing as how he obviously knew close to nothing where potions were concerned, but had wisely decided not to answer. He had spent the rest of the class period waiting in line outside the door of the resident mediwitch, Madam Pomfrey, who was administering doses of the antidote to the majority of his class. Draco, who had miraculously managed to escape the blast, had looked positively gleeful at his plight.

He'd also met his Head of House, Professor Mcgonagall. She was a rather severe, austere woman; she wore spectacles and kept her hair clasped in a tight bun. She had started the class as a cat; apparently she was an animagus, which was a sort of wizard or witch that could change into a specific animal. Harry found himself fascinated and simultaneously intimidated. McGonagall, unlike Snape, didn't expect him to be perfect, but she did seem to expect every single one of the students to come damn close. Harry spent the majority of the class taking notes (using a quill was decidedly more trouble than it was worth, and it left unsightly splotches on his…parchment. He could only guess that the old fashioned writing materials were all a part of the 'wizarding experience', or some such rot, because they were horrendously impractical). The rest was spent attempting to change a matchstick into a needle. It was decidedly difficult, though he was fairly certain that his match looked vaguely thinner at the end of the class period than it had before. Hermione Granger, an exceedingly intelligent witch with bushy brown hair, protuberant buckteeth, a habit of bouncing up and down in her seat when she knew the answer to a question (which was always), and what Harry suspected was an eidetic memory, managed to change the matchstick into a sort of flattened needle. McGonagall awarded Gryffindor ten points as a result.

Professor Sprout was a rather squat, grey-haired woman. She worked in the Hogwarts greenhouses, clumping firmly among the students and correcting them in an amiable sort of way whenever they happened to mishandle a plant. They had been tasked with repotting bouncing bulbs, which vaguely resembled highly energetic roots. Ron had spent close to ten minutes chasing one around the room, scrabbling around in the dirt and making elaborate dives in an effort to catch hold of it. They ahd left the greenhouses red-faced and sweating.

Professor Binns taught History of Magic. Harry had wondered exactly how long he had been doing so, seeing as how he was dead, but had been much too polite to ask him. Right around the time the fourth student drifted off into sleep, he had come to the conclusion that Professor Binns wasn't even entirely aware they were there. He wasn't sure if it was a ghost thing; Nearly Headless Nick, the Gryffindor Ghost, had seemed to be perfectly conscious of what went going on around him. Then he had gotten to wondering if perhaps Binns didn't know he was dead, which would explain quite a lot, really, and before he knew it he had fallen asleep as well. He'd woken up at the sound of the bell over an hour later.

Defense Against the Dark Arts was taught by Professor Quirrel, a rather feeble, frail looking man with a stutter and a garlic-scented turban wrapped around his skull. He'd spent the majority of the class period recounting the hundreds of dangerous animals of the magical world and explaining why each and every one was absolutely terrifying and should never be approached; his hands had fluttered nervously around the hems of his sleeves the entire time. Nonetheless, he had seemed friendly enough, and it was obvious that he knew plenty of information.

Harry hated him, though. The second he'd walked into the room, his head had burned like fire.


	5. Inner Reflections

Harry stared at his open palm. It looked no different than normal; the creases were still in the same place, and the skin tone was identical to how it had been yesterday. There wasn't so much as a scratch to signal that less than three days ago he had fought with one of the most dangerous wizards in the history of magic over the Philosopher's Stone. His fingers were no different than before he'd started school; he'd almost expected there to be marks, despite his unnatural healing ability. It appeared, however, that burning your Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher to ash using your bare hands didn't alter your appearance.

No one had treated him any differently, save to stare at him in an even more worshipful manner than before (generally Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, and Ravenclaws), increase their spiteful comments (generally Slytherins) or to increase the amount of gossip in the newspaper (surely there was a law that would allow him to go unharassed by the press until he was old enough to grow stubble or something?).

It was a bit odd, really, seeing as how in the muggle world murder normally ended in prison. Admittedly he had been acting in self-defense, but didn't that mean he would still need to have a trial? Quirrel was dead (a pile of ashes and Voldemort-stink, and didn't that just suck balls for him, the great git), and though he may have deserved SOMETHING it probably wasn't the rather horrid end he'd been left with. If it were up to Harry, he would've received a punch in the crotch and a trip to prison, Azka-whatsit (though if the rumors were to be believed, death was infinitely preferable to the wizarding world's infamous holding cells).

Harry, feeling the precursor for shock, decided to outline what he knew in his head in such a way that he could stop rambling off and FOCUS long enough to sort out his scrambled thoughts.

1. Quirrel was dead.

This seemed like as good a place to start as any, seeing as how the evidence was pretty irrefutable (ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that). Unless Quirrel had the ability to gather his scorched atoms and bind them back together when his brain was little more than a pile of unrecognizable meat-dust, his state of being wasn't going to change back to 'living' again any time soon. Harry wasn't sure how to feel about that.

2. Quirrel was Voldemort.

No, no, that was wrong-

2. Quirrel had been (Past tense. Awkward.) carrying Voldemort around with him for the better part of a year, listening to every word he said and generally being disturbingly sycophantic.

This was alarming. Apparently "p-p-poor s-s-stuttering P-Professor Quirrel" had Oscar-worthy acting skills. If Dumbledore couldn't spot a Death Eater in the ranks of his own staff members, let alone a Death Eater with Voldemort glued to the back of his head like so much paper mache in a macabre art show, then who's to say that the rest of his teachers weren't Death Eaters as well? Harry resolved to never get detention again. Ever. (And wasn't that a resolution doomed to failure.)

3. Ron and Hermione could've died.

It would've been a weird way to go, too, seeing as how their choices had been as follows: strangled/smothered by malicious weeds with heliophobia, trampled by a troll they had knocked out with its own club and a wand up the nose (it had taken aeons to get the nasty gunk off, and even then he had been leery of touching it), falling off a broom and breaking their necks in a room full of keys aspiring to be birds (life was full of surprises, and Harry was still in his uncoordinated stage), murdered by living chess pieces (Ron was still recovering from the blow to the head; no matter how often Madame Pomfrey assured him he was fine, all Harry could see was his friend's crumpled body, pale as death in a room of checkered squares and statues), burned alive/poisoned (by Snape, though, which Harry had honestly been expecting to happen all year anyway, so it wouldn't have been so surprising), or murdered by Quirrelmort. Voldrel. Voldequir. Something.

4. If they had died, it would've been completely his fault.

It appeared that he had been cursed as a child (not talking about the avada kedavra, though that had happened too), because no matter what he did and where he went trouble always followed. It was as if disaster was his own little lap dog, licking and tainting the hands of everyone he met. Sure, they had made the choice to follow him, but they wouldn't have been in danger if there had been no 'him' to follow.

…that last thought probably indicated he had mental problems. Not that the revelation was anything new, but normally his issues came in the easily recognizable form of Hyde. Huh.

They could've died.

Harry dug his nails into his palms until he felt blood.

5. He'd killed a man.

His second, apparently, if the rumors of his defeating Voldemort as a child were to be believed. Why, then, had no one thought to take him away to jail to await trial? Did the wizarding world not have a juvenile detention center? Or was it simply that Voldemort was so evil, so hated, that killing him was perfectly acceptable no matter the circumstances?

Even through his shock Harry felt guilty, horrendously so, because, hey, if an "eye for an eye makes the whole world blind", then what did a murder for a murder make?

How was he still alive anyway? Quirrel was a fully trained defense specialist, no matter how useless he may have appeared, and he was toting around Voldemort like a face-shaped sack of incredibly intelligent and ridiculously cruel dark lord. Harry was eleven years old, and sometimes he tripped over his own shoes getting out of bed in the morning. How was it that an eleven-year-old and his two compatriots took down a combination of the darkest wizard in a century and an instructor over eight years their senior without help from a single adult? Which brought him to his next thought-

6. Everyone else in the blasted school was absolutely useless.

Professor McGonagall didn't even consider that he was right, Dumbledore only showed up after he was already unconscious (and Quirrel was already barbequed), Snape was the incarnation of pure evil (Harry didn't really believe this, seeing as how Snape may've been the one to save his life when he was being thrown off of his own broom, but it still felt nice to think it), and Quirrel was a murderous lunatic. Neville had been surprisingly brave, though; Harry felt inexplicably proud of his fellow Gryffindor, and explicably bad about the whole body-bind thing.

7. Something was wrong.

Something HAD been wrong all year. He had a sneaking suspicion that it was related to Hyde's steady growth and his lapses in memory. For a while he had been afraid that perhaps Hyde had been taking control of him and he hadn't noticed, but the barrier between the separate portions of their mind was stronger than ever. Some nights he would wake up unreasonably exhausted, as if he had run miles and miles, and would have no recollection of going to sleep. Sometimes there would be bruises, odd cuts, and-on one memorable occasion-a broken bone. When, after each time this happened, no one was found dead or injured, Harry decided to do what he always did when faced with a potentially dangerous secret: he hid it away so thoroughly that not even his friends suspected. It wasn't like he cared about his injuries; they were nothing compared to the roof-jump, after all, and healed on their own.

It still didn't explain the sense of wrongness or Hyde's increasing size (he'd had to expand the other side of the barrier twice now in an effort to give his insanity-and wasn't that a weird thought-enough room to move around comfortably). It also didn't explain the tar-colored barrier, which had become so thick and viscous that it had begun to run and drip disturbingly over the floor around it. For some reason, Hyde seemed to…if not frighten it, then at least force it to give him a large berth. Harry spent his time in the dreamscape watching the tar glacially slurp its way in a five foot circle around Hyde's corner from the other side of the room with a sense of horror, mentally marking its slow expansion across the floor.

He counted himself lucky that it hadn't come to life and eaten him yet.

8. The something-that-was-wrong was connected to Albus Dumbledore, Chief Mugwump and Supreme Toolbag-That-Couldn't-Bother-To-Show-Up-Until-Peop le-Died-What-The-Hell.

Every time Harry met his gaze it felt as if his brain was being squeezed very tightly through a drinking straw (not even a normal drinking straw, either, but one of those mini black ones that Aunt Petunia got in her Starbucks coffees), and whenever that happened the tar in his mind would-would FLEX, almost, as if in some ridiculous display. He was willing to bet his invisibility cloak that it was Dumbledore's fault that the tar barrier was mutated into some sort of mental goop-monster. Not like there was anything he could do about that, though, seeing as how Dumbledore was apparently powerful enough to give Voldemort the heebie-jeebies. In true inner-Slytherin fashion (because '_suck it, Malfoy'_, that's why), Harry had decided to keep his epiphany quiet. Hermione was brilliant in every form of the word, and Ron was the best tactician an eleven-year-old could be, but if Dumbledore could create tar-muck in his mind then he could probably do the same to theirs. Until he knew how to get rid of it, he couldn't risk them; somehow he doubted they had their own respective Hydes to protect them.

Once, when he had awoken to the familiar, unfathomable bruises and scratches, along with the requisite memory loss, Ron had asked offhandedly what he'd needed to talk to Dumbledore about. Harry found this suspicious to the extreme, seeing as how not only did he have no recollection of needing to talk to Dumbledore about anything, but he had purportedly LOST A GIANT CHUNK OF MEMORY IN HIS PRESENCE. If that didn't scream guilty, then he'd eat his wand. He hadn't let on to Ron, of course; he'd made up some ridiculous lie about wanting to discuss staying at Hogwarts over the summer (he'd already asked the second month of school, and had been denied and summarily offered a blasted lemon drop), to which Ron had enthusiastically invited him over to his own home instead. So at least something good had come out of the whole situation.

In an effort to not be consumed by the Monster o' Tar, Harry had developed the Dumbledore-Avoidance system, which involved a subtle lack of eye contact and a feigned illness every time he was asked to meet the headmaster. Judging by the periods of blank how-did-I-get-here-where-did-these-bruises-come-fr om-damn-it that dotted the school year, he'd failed as often as he'd succeeded.

9. Scientia Potentia Est (knowledge was power).

If not for Hermione's previous readings on the Devil's Snare, they wouldn't have even made it past the second chamber. Harry, in an attempt to catch up to his magic-born peers, had actually been reading and studying like mad the past year. The problem was that he had apparently been studying the wrong things; he'd never been particularly good at rote memorization or library-scoping like Hermione, and as a result had ended up just picking random books off of the shelves. This resulted in either

A. a new, diverse bit of knowledge on various subjects, or

B. a complete lack of comprehension on his part, as sometimes the books he picked out were much too high-level for him and required background experience.

He'd been learning, though, and was quite proud of himself for doing so, even if he couldn't attain Hermione's own level of study (the hat had probably wanted her to go into Ravenclaw. She could be a raven-lion, and he could be a…snake-lion, which brought forth really weird mental images). Harry tended to downplay his actual intelligence, though. This was partly due to his experiences at the Dursley household, wherein Dudley would award him for his good grades by gifting him with a jealousy-fuelled punch to the head. It was also because of Dumbledore (who he really, REALLY needed to underestimate him, because it wasn't like he had anything else going for him in his whole need-to-stop-a-really-old-really-experienced-wizar d-from-putting-tar-in-my-head). While it was entirely possible that Hermione would be thrilled to have an intellectual peer instead of a sort of oblivious, simple-minded Harry, there was always the chance that she would turn into a jealous Dudley-type person. Unlikely, but hey, Harry was paranoid. What with the whole Dark Lord thing, he figured he had the right to be. Even if she did respond to his studying with joy (which she would if he told her, paranoia aside, but still, the chance that she wouldn't…), Ron might end of feeling left out; Harry knew his best mate was a tactical genius and a bloody great friend, but he also knew that Ron had already spent the majority of his life feeling overshadowed by people close to him. He didn't want to add it that, not if he could help it.

Plus, acting stupid had its advantages. It annoyed the sneer right out of Snape and made his snide comments even more bitingly brilliant (Harry had several memorized, which he reflected on in times of despondency for a good laugh). It ensured that no one paid him any more undue attention than he already received as the Boy-Who-Lived-To-Kill-The-Dark-Lord-And-Now-Quirre l-Too. It made him more approachable ("Don't mind me, just a regular old kid struggling my way through first-year spellwork") and made it so that whenever he snuck out of the dorms at night, his friends assumed he was off to roam the halls instead of off to sit in the library and read books.

Harry had wandered through Hogwarts quite a bit, though, if simply because it was too wonderful an opportunity to pass up. He'd already discovered several rooms he hadn't known to exist, including the one with the fabled Mirror of the Erised, and the entrance to the Hogwarts kitchens (courtesy of Fred and George, who he'd followed in a fit of whimsy). He'd even fallen through a tapestry into what appeared to be a hidden corridor, which somehow lead him down three floors and out of the breastplate of an incredibly large metal knight. All the years of avoiding Dudley had taught him how to contort himself in order to best get into small areas, how to jump from high places in such a way that he could roll sideways to relieve the pressure on his bones during a landing, and how to clamber up pipes and uneven bricks to explore the uppermost corners of the castle; as a result, his explorations sometimes took him off the normal path of curious students. While it would normally be quite dangerous to wander the corridors of a magical area during the black of night, Harry's inability to die properly gave him a sort of free pass. He'd already killed himself twice just that year: once when he'd slipped and fallen off a support beam and down three stories in a moment of clumsiness, and another time when he'd tripped over his untied shoelace and straight into the halberd of a nearby suit of armor. Both times he'd had to piece himself back together and cleanse the room of blood ("Scourgify!") before the rest of the castle had awoken, and both rimes he'd fallen asleep during class and been assigned detention. Perhaps most alarming had been when the knight who's halberd he'd impaled himself on had stooped to help him up; he supposed that said a lot about his sanity, that he found a moving knight more prevalent than his own demise and subsequent revival.

10. Dying sucked, but didn't really matter in the long run so long as it was him that was doing the dying.

He'd known this for a while of course, but it was still worth mentioning. After all, hadn't Voldemort been searching for immortality? He'd read about it in one of his history books (Binn's lectures were still steadfastly ignored in favor of sleep), and the whole "flight from death" bit was kind of a giveaway. Harry found it ironic that he'd achieved what Voldemort had spent his whole life trying to do purely on accident.

It was probably the avada to the forehead. It did things to a person.

11. If Voldemort was really so hell-bent on killing him, he should probably do something about it.

Harry didn't want to kill anyone. He wasn't nearly as innocent as he'd been at the beginning of the year, though whether that was due to Hyde's influence or his new experiences remained to be seen. Nevertheless, that didn't mean he wanted to intentionally murder someone. Not yet.

If Voldemort was going to kill him, the Dark Lord was going to use whatever means necessary to do so. Anyone depraved enough to slaughter unicorns and drink their blood on their off-time would have no qualms about doing the same to bushy haired schoolgirls and redheaded Weasley boys.

The fact remained that Harry would much rather kill Voldemort than watch him kill Ron and Hermione.

That left him with two main options. He could either give himself up and beg the psychopath to spare his friends' lives-knowing that he would die in the process-or he could do his best to learn as much as possible so that when he eventually met Voldemort again he could get him first. Or try to, anyway. Somehow he found the notion of his succeeding improbable.

Hermione and Ron's lives could possibly be hinged on his success.

Harry leaned back against the pillows of the hospital wing with a soft sigh. Well then. He had a lot of work to do.


End file.
